On PHPMaster.com there's a new tutorial talking about Phalcon, yet another PHP framework to add to the now long list. There's something different about this one, though. Phalcon sets itself apart by having its base code be inside an installable PHP module.

There’s a wide offering of PHP frameworks, from full-stack frameworks containing ORMs, validation components, and loads of HTML helpers, to micro frameworks which go little beyond offering routing functionality. They all claim to be special, either with beautiful syntax, high speed, or good documentation. One of those frameworks is Phalcon. But Phalcon really is quite different compared to the other frameworks; it isn’t just another package that you download, rather it’s a PHP module written in C. In this article we’ll take a brief look at what Phalcon looks like and what makes it so special.

They introduce the framework a bit and include some basic benchmarks (requests per second and time per request) showing the major advantage being a native module has for Phalcon. He then gets into the usage of it - setting up mod_rewrite, creating the project structure and creating the MVC scripts. There's also a brief mention of the Phalcon query language that can be used to interact with the database.